“Then why did you interview for the show?”

“That was an experiment,” he said. “I wouldn’t say yes if they asked me.”

Mara liked that it bothered him, and that he couldn’t stop her. She hadn’t put much hope in the interview process—she’d assumed that, like most things, it wouldn’t work out—but now that she had a choice, it gave her a warm sense in her belly, and even more so because Ethan disapproved. Besides, there was prize money. Anyone who made it six weeks got a hundred grand. She thought she’d leave Ethan if she made it, start over with the cash, and maybe he sensed that.

She called Lenny and told him she wanted in. She was going to be in Civilization’s opening cast, part of a brand-new journey. “This will be the hardest thing you ever do,” Lenny told her.

“Of course,” she said. But she doubted it.

LENNY ASKED MARA TO FILM HERSELF GETTING READY, BUT SINCE THE DETAILS OF the show were meant to be a surprise, she wasn’t sure how to prepare. She mostly walked around the property and showed off things she had already done. Ethan made sure she introduced him. “This is our wood-fired hot tub we built,” she said, and he added, from outside the frame, “We built it together,” like she hadn’t just said that. Ethan had a structure behind the camper, a medieval-style roundhouse that he’d worked on sporadically for years. It wasn’t finished, but it was still impressive, with stone walls and a pointy roof. She could tell that Ethan wanted her to film it, but she didn’t. In her mind she had already won the money, and could afford to distinguish between what was hers and what was his.

Lenny sent an eighty-page contract, which Mara was meant to sign in a dozen places and return. She read some of it, then skipped to the part about the prize. There it was: one hundred thousand dollars. With money like that, she’d have options. She could get her GED. There was a community college nearby with a two-year program in wind turbines, and she’d heard that its graduates did well. Mara didn’t care about wind turbines, but she thought she’d be good at the job—working alone, fixing things. She had always been quick to learn.

That was how she felt about survivalism, too. It wasn’t that she was naturally talented, though she knew she was better than most people, and was probably the best instructor at Primal Instinct. She just spent a lot of time in the woods, and she wasn’t upset about being uncomfortable or working hard. It was easy for her to do one task and then another, and then another, which was the way to get through most things in life. She didn’t overthink.

At work, her clients overthought everything. They got cold and some part of them feared they’d be cold forever. They used terms like starvation mode after half a day, and they meant it. When their campouts ended, they were either thrilled or morose, with no middle ground. Mara never understood how a client could be disappointed in the morning. After all, they’d set out to stay in the woods overnight, and they’d succeeded. But clearly there was something else that clients wanted, and no way to gauge from the outside if they found it or not.